Chapter 3: Edelweiss
You've spent your whole career giving voice to other people. It takes you until Sunday night to realise you're going to have to use your own.
You consider the options. You could go to the barracks and knock. You picture it: Horangi answering the door with a grin, a corridor full of KorTac operators looking up from their phones, and König somewhere at the back of the room, fifty metres away while sitting two metres from you. You'd be making him into exactly the spectacle he was trying to save you from.
You could write a note. Leave it on his bunk. You draft four. They all sound like court transcripts.
You could wait. You've been told patience is a virtue. You've never seen any evidence of it.
At 04:30 on Monday, you lace up your boots, put on both pairs of socks, borrow a headlamp from the drying room, and walk out through the motor pool gate alone.
The path is harder without someone in front of you testing every stone. You take the first switchback too fast and slide on loose scree, catch yourself on a larch, and swear in all five of your languages. In the pine scrub you lose the trail completely and have to stand very still with the headlamp off, waiting for your eyes to adjust, listening to the enormous quiet of the mountain until you can see the pale thread of the track again. Twice you think about turning back. Both times you think about a man who climbed this every single morning, in the dark, to bend down for you.
You keep going.
The sky is just starting to grey when you come over the last rise and find the hide, and find him.
He's not in it. He's sitting on the rock outcrop beside it, out in the open, knees drawn up, rifle case at his side unopened. He isn't watching the wind. He's watching the east. And his hood is pushed back off his face, sitting on his shoulders like a scarf, because he thought he was alone.
In the thin light you see all of him: the strong jaw dusted with stubble, the scar notching his lip, ash-brown hair cropped short and crushed flat by the fabric. He looks younger than you expected and more tired. In his hands is a stem of edelweiss, and he's turning it slowly between his gloved fingers like a man who has picked it out of habit and doesn't know who to give it to anymore.
You step on a stone. It clicks.
His hand goes to the hood.
"Don't," you say. "Please. Not for me."
He freezes with his fingers in the fabric. He's half turned toward you, and his face goes through about six emotions in a second, the main one being pure disbelief.
"You walked up," he says. "Alone. In the dark."
"I had a good teacher. He tests every stone." You come closer, breathing hard, legs shaking from the climb, and sit down on the rock next to him. Not touching. A respectful inch. "I nearly fell off your mountain twice. I want you to know that. I'm going to bring it up for the rest of your life."
"Why..." He's still holding the hood. He lets go of it slowly, like defusing something. "Why did you come?"
"Because there were no flowers on my desk."
"I thought..." He looks down at the edelweiss. "Horangi told everyone. The whole canteen. They made jokes. The big monster and the translator. He meant nothing bad by it, he is a clown sometimes, but..." His jaw works. "I know what it is to be looked at in that building. I have had it for six years. You have had it for three weeks and already they call you the dictionary. I did not want to add something worse."
"König."
"So I stopped. It was the only thing I could do that would make it go away."
You've done this for a living. You know how to hear what's under a sentence. And under this one is a man who, faced with a problem, chose the solution that cost him everything and you nothing, and then sat on a rock at dawn holding a flower he couldn't give.
"Can I translate that for you?" you ask.
He blinks. "What?"
"What you just said. I think something got lost. Let me try." You take a breath and look out at the east, where the first line of gold is cutting along the peaks of the Zillertal. And you do what you trained for: you speak in the first person, and you carry it carefully.
"I like her," you say. "I liked her from the first time she didn't make my words smaller. I climbed a mountain every morning for her, which is less impressive than it sounds because I climb it anyway, but I still did it. And when I got scared people would laugh at her, I decided it was better to lose her than to let that happen, and I didn't ask her what she wanted, because asking her felt like the most frightening thing I could possibly do."
The silence afterwards is the loudest thing you have ever heard. Somewhere far below, a cowbell.
"Is that accurate?" you ask. "I'm very good. But I've been wrong before."
König makes a sound. It's not a laugh, quite. He drops his head and presses the heel of his gloved hand against his eyes, and his huge shoulders shake once.
"Ja," he says thickly, into his palm. "Ja. That is... accurate. Perhaps a little too accurate. You are very good."
"Thank you." Your heart is going like a hammer. "Then here's my reply. No translation needed. I don't care what Horangi says in the canteen. I've been laughed at in four countries by people with worse aim than him. The only thing about that building I've hated in three weeks is the last six days, when my desk was empty and the man who fills it with colour was sitting alone on a rock, deciding things on my behalf."
He lowers his hand. His eyes are wet and very blue in the new light.
"Ask me," you say. "The frightening thing. Ask me what I want."
He looks at you for a long time. The sun clears the ridge and lands on both of you at once, and suddenly everything is gold: the frost on the turf, the edelweiss in his fingers, the scar on his lip.
"What do you want?" König asks. His voice cracks right down the middle and he doesn't try to hide it.
"I want you to keep putting flowers on my desk," you say. "I want you to sit next to me in the canteen and let them talk. I want you to teach me to read the wind so I can tell you when your breathing's bad. And right now..." You run out of courage and borrow some from the altitude. "Right now I'd like to kiss you. Only if you want. Only if it's yours to give."
He breathes out, long and unsteady.
Then he holds out the edelweiss. You take it. And with his free hand, slowly enough that you could stop him a dozen times, he reaches up and pulls off his glove with his teeth.
His bare hand is enormous, warm in spite of the cold, rough with calluses at the trigger finger and the heel. He lays it against your cheek like he's afraid you'll startle. His thumb moves once across your cheekbone.
"Ich will," he says. I want to. "Sehr."
You lean in. He meets you halfway, which for him means folding down a long way, and the first kiss is barely anything: a careful press, cold lips, the scrape of stubble, his breath shaking against your mouth. He pulls back an inch to look at you, as if checking you're still there, still choosing this.
You put your hand on the back of his neck and pull him down again.
The second kiss is not careful. He makes a low sound in his chest and his hand slides back into your hair, and you can feel him trembling the way the ground trembles before something big moves. You hold on to the rough fabric of the hood bunched at his collar and kiss him back until you've both forgotten about the altitude, the cold, the canteen, everything except the warmth of his mouth and the sound of his breath going ragged.
When you finally break apart, his forehead stays against yours. He's laughing very quietly, as if he's afraid someone will take it away.
"Your hood," you say. "You didn't put it back."
"No." He doesn't move to. "Today I think I will let you look."
So you do. In the gold light, from very close, you look at him: the lines at the corners of his eyes, the chapped lip with its scar, the absolute wonder on a face that's spent years behind a curtain. He lets you. His ears go red and he doesn't look away once.
"Well," you say eventually, a little hoarse. "The Polish guys owe each other a lot of money."
"Why?"
"Half of them think you're hiding a monster. Half of them think you're a movie star." You trace the scar with your thumb. He shivers. "Everyone loses."
"And you?" Barely audible. "What do you think?"
"I think you're the man who brings me flowers," you say. "That's all I needed to know."
You walk down together when the Polish team's trucks start grinding up the access road. At the rock step he goes first, then turns and holds out his bare hand, palm up.
This time, when you're safely down, he doesn't let go.
You walk into the compound that way, his hand swallowing yours, the hood back over his face because some things take more than one sunrise to change. Horangi is in the motor pool doorway with a coffee. He opens his mouth.
König looks at him. Just looks, through the eyeholes, from a height of two metres ten.
Horangi closes his mouth, mimes zipping it, and then, when König isn't watching, gives you two enthusiastic thumbs up.
On Tuesday there is a jam jar on your desk instead of a paper cup. It's full of water and gentians and one stem of edelweiss, and taped to the side is a range card in that heavy, careful hand.
Wind: calm. Visibility: excellent. Abendessen, Freitag? Ich koche.
Dinner, Friday? I'll cook.
You write your answer underneath in red pen, the way you'd correct a transcript, and leave it on the windowsill of the barracks where only a man who gets up at four will find it.
Ja. Bring the rum.